Meet the Hardest Working Man in Porn

At 35, Shimiken is the king of Japanese porn, a $20 billion industry that produces more than double the number of adult films that America does. The only problem: He's part of an endangered species—1 of only 70 (maybe just 30, by some estimates) male actors in a business that churns out thousands of videos a year—and while he keeps coming, the reinforcements don't. Why won't anybody help this guy out, for fuck's sake?

On a sunny Saturday morning in eastern Tokyo, a silver Audi pulls into a parking lot and sparks pandemonium. Out of the driver's seat bounces a small, stocky man with bulging biceps, spiky orange hair, and a broad smile spread across his effulgent, spray-tanned face. He bounds onto the pavement wearing a hoodie and a T-shirt that reads SEX INSTRUCTOR. To his left, the mostly male crowd leans forward, en masse. "Shimiken!" several shout, and a clatter of smartphone shutter sounds follows like a round of applause.

"Let's go," Shimiken whispers to a handler attempting to clear a path through the throng. He raises one arm over his head to air-high-five his riveted fans. It's the morning of the Japan Adult Expo, and the crowd has been waiting for tickets. Inside, they'll get to meet the stars of their wildest fantasies. Outside, they've already caught a glimpse of something rarer: the man who has actually lived them all.

At 35 years old, Shimiken is the king of Japanese porn, more often referred to here as AV (adult video), and there is essentially nothing he won't do or hasn't done while getting busy with more than 7,500 different female costars, including a former teen pop singer, Hungarian exchange students, and a pair of 72-year-old twins. In 18 years and more than 7,000 films, Shimiken has refused only one scenario: having sex with an actress after she had sex with a dog. (He agreed to a rewrite in which the dog merely licked butter off the woman before their scene.)

Shimiken's catholic attitude toward kink, combined with what—in porn years—is an epic tenure, has earned him the widespread national recognition of a younger Ron Jeremy or a more seasoned James Deen. The 50-year-old driver picking me up from the Tokyo airport hears his name and nods: "Shimiken? Shimiken is famous. Or at least, his dick is." Everyone in the AV industry reveres both his name and his anatomy (16 centimeters—or 6.3 inches—per an online profile), though the latter is always pixelated. As Shimiken passes through the halls of the convention's backstage, robed women pop out from side rooms and coo greetings through cigarette smoke, including otsukaresama, which literally means "you must be tired." It's a standard Japanese offering of thanks, but in this case, it has an all-too-apt application. Because everyone in the know understands that Shimiken is beset by XXX exhaustion.

Life with a XXX actress has its perks—hearing about her day isn't one of them.

By Michael Kaplan

A few months ago, in a fit of on-set fatigue, Shimiken went public with his feelings about the stresses of being one of the few male talents in Japanese adult video: "In this industry there are only 70 male porn stars to 10,000 women. The number of male porn stars in Japan is less than that of Bengal tigers," he wrote in a tweet. "With 4,000 new films every month, the number of male actors simply isn't enough. This industry is like a hole in the wall that needs to get bigger!" By the time he wrapped up his next money shot and checked his phone, his call to arms, or cry for help, had been retweeted more than 3,000 times.

From the Editors of Details

"The 70 guys refers to the stallions on call," explains an AV filmmaker named Daeng (who requested that his last name be withheld). High-profile actors, like Shimiken, are in heavier rotation. "It's a physically demanding job, and if they do run out of juice, it's not good." The AV director Michiru Ayashiyama worries that this already overtaxed group of performers will not only tire out but also age out of relevance."I sincerely hope the younger pool increases," he says, "because soon these actors are going to get old. Their experience will go up, but their strength will go down."

And so Shimiken arrives at Japan's largest porn expo bearing a nation's libido on his shoulders. He hasn't taken a vacation in seven years. He's too busy keeping it up in order to keep an estimated $20 billion industry from going limp.

Though Shimiken's count of working male porn actors might seem low, other insiders have pegged the number as even lower, closer to 30. As for their female counterparts, a controversial Japanese article recently asserted that, statistically, 1 in 200 Japanese women had appeared in an AV film, with an industry churn of 6,000 new actresses a year, according to the author Atsuhiko Nakamura. Demand is high—Japan produces more than double the number of porn films as the U.S., though America has more than twice its population.

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Even in the U.S., most aspiring men drop out when faced with the realities of porn. "We're not talking about splitting firewood here, but it is very physically demanding," says Kevin O'Neal, a former porn actor and a current agent at Adult Talent Managers in Los Angeles. "And you're going to have to do it with a camera between your legs." Among AV performers, Shimiken's stamina is legendary—his workload often has him shooting eight or nine hours a day, seven days a week. "He must be Mr. Magic," O'Neal concludes.

To maintain the strength necessary to make up to six movies a day, Shimiken exercises 90 minutes a day, four days a week, focusing on heavy weight lifting and deep squats, which he says not only help his thrusts but also build up testosterone. He lives off a go-bag filled with glutamine, branched-chain amino acid, zinc (said to make semen whiter), arginine, and vitamin jelly. He dumps the bag's contents out for inspection, and nowhere in the pile is the pill that fuels the American porn industry: Viagra. "I haven't had to use it," he says. "Yet."

While the physical requirements are certainly a barrier to entry for most men, Shimiken points out that because the ranks are thin, they stay thin—despite the obvious benefits. "Men say the pool is just too small to risk entering," he explains. "Anyone who tries it will be immediately recognizable and could rule out ever having a normal life."

Though a few AV stars (mostly female) have transitioned to success as TV presenters or talking-head personalities, "Shimiken's concerns do point to very real issues regarding social stigma in Japan," says Kumiko Endo, an adjunct professor of religion at Hofstra University. "There are definite roadblocks for former AV actors who want to transition into the mainstream."

Yujiro Enoki, the director of the documentary The Other Side of the Sex, goes further, warning that great fame can bring great shame. "Once you have become an AV star, it becomes very hard to get a 'normal' job," he says. "And it can only become worse if you try to conceal your past. It doesn't matter whether you are retired or not, you cannot have financial credit from a bank, so it's really difficult to get, for example, a housing loan." Several years back, Shimiken found himself unable to rent an apartment. Landlord after landlord judged his occupation objectionable, even when he showed them a full bank account. He was able to sign a lease only when one real-estate agent revealed she was a fan. She offered to get him a place to live if he'd come to dinner with fans from her office.

"Do you have my costume?" Shimiken asks Shota Wakasugi, a lanky twentysomething in a bright-blue hoodie wearing Harry Potter glasses. With a flourish, he pulls out a Day-Glo orange reindeer costume just a shade off from Shimiken's own head-to-toe tawniness. Wakasugi works for Tonakai, an herbal supplement that promises to give users the relentless endurance of Santa's preferred sled animals and, consumers can hope, Shimiken himself. Sexual-enhancement supplements are big business in Japan, and while Shimiken eschews the little blue pill, he was, according to Wakasugi, a natural for Tonakai's spokesman because of his cheerful nature, good energy, and, of course, "incomparable stamina." When asked why more men don't follow his client's career path, Wakasugi pauses for a moment, then hands Shimiken a mask adorned with phallic antlers and a glittering orange superhero cape. "I don't know if men here don't want to do what he does," he says, "or if they simply physically can't do it."

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In 2013, The Guardian reported that a huge swath of Japan's younger generation was suffering from "celibacy syndrome," with 45 percent of women ages 16 to 24 and more than 25 percent of men ages 16 to 24 reporting no interest in sex whatsoever. This comes on the heels of other apocalyptic erotic forecasts: Japan has the second-lowest birthrate in the world, one in four marriages is reportedly sexless, and a new term has cast a long shadow in the cultural conversation: soshokukei dansei, or grass-eating men, which is used to describe a generation of young males who are unassertive with women and uninterested in the intricacies of courtship and intimacy. In a recent poll, 60.5 percent of men between 20 and 34 identified as grass-eaters, which helps explain why Japan ranks as the world's second-largest porn market (behind only South Korea—the U.S. lags at a distant third).

"I don't necessarily think this particular generation has had a decline in sexual desire, but there has been a shift in sexual outlets," Endo says. As Japan's young men consume more pornography and pursue fewer traditional dating opportunities, the disparity builds, with "higher pornography feeding into the declining interpersonal element," creating a vicious circle of solo love. For the large portion of Japan's so-called grass-eating men, Endo says, the drift toward more porn and fewer relationships "is more about passively opting out than making a decision." Japan's foundering economy is also a factor. "You have a generation of men who haven't found security financially, while their fathers did by their age. That lends itself to undermining masculinity," she says. "And there's no real pickup or bar-dating culture, so it takes a lot of proactive energy and confidence to put yourself out there."

Confidence was never a problem for Shimiken. Born Ken Shimizu in 1979 in a small village hours outside Tokyo, he is squarely in the generation that would later be called soshokukei dansei. But Shimiken never had any taste for grass. By 15, he was honing his skills as a pickup artist, obsessively if not always successfully hitting on women on the street and in arcades. He loved sex and porn unabashedly. The dirtier, the better. While other boys were in class, Shimiken would sneak onto the school roof and jack off over the side of the building, hearing the screams of the girls below as his semen splattered on their classroom windows. After stumbling upon a scatological porn parody of The Swiss Family Robinson (which, in a failure of translation, can only be described as The Shit and Piss Family Robinson), he wrote an editorial for the school newspaper about how its rare and elegant beauty deserved an Academy Award. When the paper refused to print his paean, he posted it on a bulletin board until a teacher tore it down. For Shimiken, the write-up was serious. "Until I saw that movie, I was so ashamed of my own kinks and desires," he says. "Then I saw there is a place where I could live these things out and have fun—a place it's totally acceptable. Maybe there are other people like me, too."

Despite a penchant for erotic mischief, Shimiken earned entrance to one of Tokyo's top private universities—generally a golden ticket to the bourgeoisie—but while his classmates competed for the next brass ring, Shimiken did the unthinkable. He opted out and began taking odd jobs to support his real passion: working in adult films. "I knew I had fetishes, and I knew there was only one place where I could live them, free from judgment. So I become a ronin," he says, using the derogatory term for students who aren't recruited out of high school and have to wander aimlessly, like the masterless samurai of yore. After a brief return to college, he dropped out, devoting himself full-time to AV.

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When his first on-camera opportunity came, it wasn't quite the glamorous orgy he'd imagined. He answered an ad in a local paper and showed up to an unpalatable offer: 15,000 yen ($126) to eat a plate of actual feces, take it or leave it. He took it. The next day, he was so sick that he went to the hospital, where doctors put him on intravenous antibiotics, diagnosed him with what he remembers simply as a "shit disease," and billed him 20,000 yen ($168). It was a brutal baptism but not uncommon, says Shimiken. For the first year, he was paid so little he had to pull extra shifts working traffic control and even serving as a guinea pig for university lab experiments.

On top of this, he also had to face down public shaming. While working his way up in the AV world, he landed a gig on an evening TV show and gained a cult following as a jokey, jock-y personality. "My parents were so excited to see me on TV," he recalls. Then one day, his cohosts decided to sabotage him and outed him on air as a pornographic performer.

"The world stopped," Shimiken remembers. Everyone in his hometown was watching. He feared his outing could cost him his part-time jobs, his apartment, and any hope of working a straight gig again. But the revelations only deepened his resolve. Instead of covering it up or apologizing, Shimiken admitted to his porn work—even the scatological forays—with such charm and humor that the public was intrigued with this unflappable, lovable pervert. The network even started a segment called "Let's Fix Shimiken," in which they would send the young star out to skydive or bungee-jump to see if extreme activity would break him of his X-rated addiction. It never did. But juicy AV offers started rolling in.

"My parents were surprised but not really surprised," he says, laughing. "They knew I was good with girls. So they said they'd consider it like another part-time job." In one of Shimiken's most popular videos, he picks up nonprofessional performers off the street and charms them into coming back and making a video at his house. In one take, his mother barges in unexpectedly, asking, "Shimiken? What is going on here?" Shimiken begged the director to take it out of the cut, but her scolding stayed and the cinema verité moment helped boost his bawdy boy-next-door image.

As Shimiken's public profile grew, he began approaching his career with the commitment of an elite athlete: eating an all-protein diet, lifting weights, abstaining from alcohol, and staying up late at night to practice ejaculating on glamour shots of starlets to get the aim of his gansha (facial) just right. "It's rude to get it in a girl's eyes," he says. "I wanted to make it perfect." Between his exacting work ethic and his popularity with female costars, Shimiken was quickly earning 50,000 to 60,000 yen ($420 to $505) a shoot and sometimes filming up to 21 scenes a week. Suddenly, he was a mascot of sorts for an unapologetic, unflagging Japanese masculinity that so many social commentators were eager to declare extinct.

"I believe a talent like Shimiken is something that only comes around every 10 to 15 years," says the director Michiru Ayashiyama. "I believe he's a bridge to the future of AV and also a bridge from AV to the outside world."

"Most men in Japan don't actually want to think of themselves as grass-eaters," says Endo, the expert in Japanese sociology. "Groups of grass-eating guys who spend time together never meet any women, so they always want to have a 'meat-eating' friend in the mix who gives them access to women." Shimiken, with his roaring libido, may be playing the part of proxy wingman to an entire generation of men. And yet it's possible his importance is greatest to Japan's undersexed women. In response to the phenomenon of grass-eating men, culture watchers have observed the phenomenon of nikushokukei joshi, or "meat-eating women," who have picked up the slack by aggressively pursuing sexual gratification. Some of these carnivores are Shimiken's biggest fans. Back at Tokyo's Japan Adult Expo, Wakasugi has just finished coating Shimiken—now in full horny-reindeer regalia—with a thick gloss of Vaseline. As he takes the stage, a group of twentysomething women break through to the front. "We love Shimiken!" says one, who came from four hours away. This is the 20th time she has seen him in person. "I love that he has such raw sexual energy." Her hand reaches out to hover half an inch from his biceps. "And I love that he is faithful to his fetishes. He's loyal to his perversions."

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She grabs her friend, insistent that I fully understand the reason for their rabid fandom. They pantomime some of Shimiken's porn signatures, including "Shimi-cun," his trademarked cunnilingus technique, a virtuoso combination of shifting his head up and down while lolling his tongue from side to side. Shimiken, posing for picture after picture nearby, somehow seems like the least pervy person in the room. A slender young woman in a headband and a plaid dress shuffles from the front of the line and into his arms, then hurries away to show her friends the photo. She works at the film-review board, an agency that oversees the placement of the pixelated "mosaic" over the genitals in all Japanese pornography, part of an archaic Meiji-era decency law that has spawned an industry in its own right. She spends her days watching AV, marking time codes for the censors. During those viewing sessions, Shimiken made an impression. "I've seen him so many times, I feel like I already know him," she says. Her coworker agrees. As Shimiken flexes and thrusts his hips, she drops to her knees to snap a picture of his crotch and sighs: "I think I know him better than my own boyfriend."

Several days after the AV expo, Shimiken sails into a restaurant in Tokyo's Nishi-Azabu neighborhood—the kind of place with silk tablecloths and staff who buzz around with earpieces to take note of famous arrivals—wearing sneakers and toting a duffel bag. The waiters greet him by name. Today was a light day: By noon, he had taken a new porn star's virginity. By three, he had wrapped a niche scene that centers on girls consuming huge jugs of water before penetration (loose translation: "the act of pleasurable bladder-control loss"). Shimiken unfolds his napkin, waves off the cocktail list, and orders a green tea and the tasting menu.

"Have you heard the phrase 'the nail that stands out gets hammered down'?" he asks, referring to a traditional Japanese adage that drawing attention to oneself can lead to persecution. "Even now, I worry about it."

Shimiken earns up to 2,800,000 yen ($23,573) a week. He owns five cars, including his Audi and a 1980s gull-wing DeLorean, and frequents Tokyo's best restaurants. But still, he admits, following his dream has cost him in very real, if intangible, ways. "I've never had a normal relationship," he says. "It has always ended horribly." He used to date costars, even in defiance of industry nonfraternization rules, but these days he avoids it. "It's my belief that you can't be a pretty girl in this industry and also be happy. This business uses pretty girls up until they feel they have no value and they quit."

Mid-meal, Shimiken also reveals that he had a fleeting taste of normal life that lasted several years but crumbled—he was once married, and he has twin daughters. Now his ex-wife and 6-year-old girls live far up north in Japan's Hokkaido region. Shimiken says he tries to visit them whenever he can, but he worries about what his presence will do. He fears his daughters will be teased because of his taboo vocation. "One day, I'll tell my daughters that Dad has chosen a career that makes many people very happy," he says. "I'll tell them I do something that brings peace to many people." But if they ever wanted to follow in his footsteps? "I would absolutely stop them. Without hesitation."

As the final course arrives, he offers a clarification: "I have no regrets about my career. This is where I was meant to be." But, he maintains, "the reality is that porn is mostly a shitty place filled with shitty people. I'd just like to be a light among the shit."

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The Japanese have a word, karoshi, that means death by overwork, an affliction widespread enough to spawn government studies and public-service announcements. So far, there is no record of its claiming the life of an AV star. Shimiken, for his part, seems determined to carry on full-throttle for as long as he can, even if reinforcements never arrive to relieve him. As we settle the bill, he starts to get animated, talking about the latest trend in Japan: elder porn, featuring XXX actors over 60. He will keep doing what he's doing forever. Or as long as he lasts. "Until I die," he says emphatically. "I will be doing this until I die."

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